


Certain Sundays

by theskywasblue



Category: Sherlock Holmes (Downey films)
Genre: Breakfast in Bed, Domestic Fluff, Fluff, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-28
Updated: 2019-10-28
Packaged: 2021-01-05 11:54:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21208094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theskywasblue/pseuds/theskywasblue
Summary: Holmes has never been one for devotion to a higher power.





	Certain Sundays

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dr_zook](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dr_zook/gifts).

> Fluff with no discernible artistic merit by the request of dr_zook. I'm not sure it exactly lines up in any way with the prompt they gave me, but life is like that sometimes.

Sundays are, by the common reckoning, for church. The low drone of cathedral bells, solemn children walking hand-in-hand with their mothers, dressed in clothes they barely dare move in, for fear of attracting more than the absolute minimum of dirt before they make their appearance before the priest.

Holmes doesn’t partake, of course. Not that he has never set foot in a house of worship. Like any family of good standing his parents made their devotionals each week, with their sullen sons in tow; it just didn’t particularly take. Right from the womb he had never been one for blind devotion to a higher power.

He can, however, get behind the idea of a day of rest. Which is exactly the purpose of Sundays on Baker street.

Mrs. Hudson is the good, church-going sort, of course. How else would she absolve her guilt of the myriad of tiny injustices she perpetrates each day? She has long given up clucking her tongue at Holmes’ godlessness, and scolding him for his ignorance of the bible (it isn’t ignorance, of course. He’s read it - it’s just a matter of not _believing_ any of it.) She still spares some reciminations once or twice a month for the good doctor, who begs off - or tries to - with demure smiles and platitudes.

_Illness does not observe the sabbath, Mrs. Husdon,_ is a particularly well-used part of his repertoire.

And, well, if it’s a matter of healing the sick, then that’s God’s work, after all.

Though the truth is that it’s only rarely that John Watson sees a patient before noon on a Sunday. Most of them are at church, worrying about the state of their souls before the state of their bodies.

Holmes recognizes the sound of their landlady’s Sunday morning routine. The hustle of feet, the clatter of dishes, a trace of perfume past the door that she would never admit to wearing; though there’s hardly a lady who doesn’t apply a little perfume before mass, and some apply a great deal more than that. When the door closes behind her, Holmes waits the requisite twelve minutes - a long enough span of time that if there is anything she’s perhaps forgotten, it will be too late for her to turn back and retrieve it - then he slips on his dressing gown and goes down to the kitchen.

As is her custom, Mrs. Hudson has left them each a platter for their breakfast: hot water for tea, some bread, meat and cheese. Holmes consolidates the two into one, to minimize the risk of smashed china, before he makes his way back upstairs.

On this, like most Sunday mornings, Watson is already awake, sitting up in bed with the newspaper spread across his lap, bare-chested, contemplative; a picture of new age decadence.

“For me?” he asks, coyly, as Holmes knocks the door shut behind himself with one foot; as if there might, by even the remotest possibility, be another human soul whom Sherlock Holmes would wait on hand and foot. “You shouldn’t have.”

“And yet I did.” He slides the tray across the bedclothes, deposits himself after it, and Watson has to put a hand on the tray, to keep the tea from spilling (though it wouldn’t be the first time they have spilled across the sheets, and had to conceal the evidence after.) “What’s the word in our local rag on this fine morning?”

Watson snorts, plucking a bit of cheese from the tray. “It’s yesterday’s paper, Holmes. You read it. Yesterday.”

“Did I?”

Watson sighs, though there is something in it much gentler than exasperation. He turns back to the first page, and begins to read aloud, and Holmes settles himself on the pillows to listen.

_”Don’t you ever get tired of knowing so awfully much?”_ Mrs. Hudson had asked once, with her usual air of dismissiveness. _”If you could finally accept there is something you _don’t know_ \- perhaps we could all have some peace at last.”_

For others there might be peace in the drone of the church bells; for him, however, this is it.

-End-


End file.
